Table Of ContentClose Encounters with Addiction
Gabor Maté, MD
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© 2011 by Gabor Maté All rights reserved. Published 2011.
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Author Note: is book is derived from a presentation on sponsored by
Writers in Treatment given at the Skirball Center in Las Angeles, CA.
While periodically statements are made directly to the audience, this e-
book adaptation of the presentation is designed for the general public.
ough it has been edited for style and content and modified for this
format, I trust you will hear my voice.
Gabor Maté, MD
June 2011
Opening Introductions
Dr. Maté is introduced by the following associates of Writers in Treatment
(WIT).
Leonard Buschel (Chairman of the Board for WIT): Last month during
the Second Annual Festival of Laughs here at the Skirball we honored
Academy Award-winning actor Lou Gossett, Jr. with the Experience,
Strength, and Hope Award. is award is given to creative individuals
whose honest and frank autobiographies describe their journey from
addiction to recovery. Next year the recipient of the Experience, Strength
and Hope Award will be none other than Buzz Aldrin, at which time he
will explain how he got that first name. Yes, he did teach Michael Jackson
how to moonwalk. at was him. By the way, how many people here first
became aware of Gabor Maté on Democracy Now? How many people
became aware of Dr. Gabor Maté for the first time because of this event
tonight? During the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, I was watching an
interview with someone who looked like John Lennon but sounded like a
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cross between Hippocrates and Quan Yin. I thought, “Who is this guy?”
and before the interview was over, I was ordering his books from Amazon.
But anyway, so it’s with no small pleasure that I have the profound honor
of bringing Dr. Gabor Maté to Los Angeles tonight.
is event would not be possible without the support of Mike Bloom
and the Pasadena Recovery Center, so thank you, Mike Bloom. In closing,
as exciting as an event this is tonight, on a personal note, it is also a very
sad day for me. It was a year ago that a good friend of mine name Jewelle
Sturm died of an accidental drug overdose. A week before she died, we
talked about the possibility of her going into rehab. Maybe if she had spent
some time at Pasadena Recovery Center more than her spirit would be here
tonight, so with that I want to introduce the Director of Pasadena
Recovery Center, Michael Bloom.
Jennifer Jimenez: Hi, I’m Jennifer Jimenez. It is an honor to be here
tonight. ank you to Mike Bloom and Pasadena Recovery Center and to
Leonard Buschel of Writers in Treatment for inviting me to be part of this
special evening tonight. I would like to say a little bit about our speaker.
He was born in Budapest, Hungary and immigrated to Canada with his
family in 1957. After graduating with a BA from the University of British
Columbia in Vancouver, he returned to pursue his childhood dreams of
becoming a doctor. Dr. Maté has been in private family practice for over
twenty years. In 1999, he became a staff physician of the Portland Hotel, a
residence and clinic for the people of Vancouver’s downtown eastside.
ere he treated many patients suffering from extreme poverty, mental
illness, addiction, and HIV infection.
As a public speaker, he addresses professional and lay audiences all over
North America. His four books are all Canadian bestsellers and have been
published internationally in nearly twenty languages, including his most
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recent title, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters With Addiction.
One of the things that struck me about In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts is his
radical belief in the humanity of people battling addiction and how they
should be treated with respect and compassion, not punished by the legal
system. Some of us who are lucky enough to be in recovery realize that it
was only through treatment that we found a way to handle the hungry
ghosts of our own addiction. Widely recognized for his firm belief in the
connection between mind and body health, he is a guest on numerous
radio and TV programs and makes regular appearances on Democracy Now.
ose of you who listen to KPFK know that Amy Goodman calls him “the
philosopher of addiction.”
Here’s what fellow Canadian Naomi Klein, author of e Shock Doctrine
and No Logo says about In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. “Gabor Maté’s
connections between the intensely personal and the global, the spiritual
and the medical, the psychological and the political are bold, wise, and
deeply moral. He is a healer to be cherished and this exciting book arrives
at just the right time.” In the foreword of his most recent book Dr. Maté
writes, “I dedicate this work to all my fellow hungry ghosts, be they the
HIV-infected street dwellers or inner city neighborhoods, the inmates of
prison or their more fortunate counterpartners with homes, families, jobs,
and successful careers. May we all find peace.” Ladies and gentlemen, it’s an
honor to introduce Dr. Gabor Maté.
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Close Encounters with Addiction
Dr. Gabor Maté: ank you kindly, one and all. And especially to Leonard
for organizing this event. We can take the perspective that addiction is a
terrible problem to be excised and that it’s a plague to somehow be fought
and defeated, or we can take another perspective. Let me read you
something that a spiritual teacher whom I cherish, who actually lives and
works here in California wrote. His words go, “Your conflicts and all the
difficult things, your problematic situations in your life are not chance or
haphazard. ey are actually yours. ey are specifically designed for you
by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. at part of you
that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you
to yourself.”
And I’d like you to consider, even before we speak about addictions, the
meaning of recovery. We talk about recovery, and in addiction, recovery is,
of course, the goal. Well, what does it mean to recover? To recover
something is to find it. at’s what the word means. Which is to say that
recovery means finding something that must have been there all along,
because if it wasn’t, you couldn’t find it. And that something that recovery
aims at finding is nothing less than oneself. So in recovery, we find
ourselves. e word healing comes from the word whole, so healing is to
become whole. In Hebrew, the word for wholeness is shalem. e word for
peace is shalom. It’s when we find ourselves and become whole that we find
peace. Addiction is all about lack of peace. It’s all about internal unrest. It’s
all about disconnection from the self. And so there is a part of us that
created a conflict precisely to lead us to ourselves. It will go to extreme
measures to wake you up. It will make you suffer greatly if you don’t listen
to it. What else can it do? at is its purpose.
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e spiritual teacher I mentioned goes on to say that the most difficult
things that happen to you on the deepest level are the most compassionate.
In other words, we can look at addiction, and I would say any problem
whatsoever in our life, whether it be conflict in our marriage, difficulty in
our daily lives, disease, and so forth. We can look upon them all as
problems to get rid of or we can see them as learning opportunities. We
can see them as episodes in our lives that were meant to bring us to
ourselves. I don’t recommend it, but I’ve had many people tell me that
their cancer, for example, is the best thing that ever happened to them. I
don’t recommend getting cancer as a way of finding yourself. I don’t
recommend getting addicted as a way of finding yourself. But I’m saying
that once this phenomenon arrives, given that it’s already there, we can take
the attitude of a problem that we have to get rid of, or we can say “what is
the opportunity that life is giving us here to learn about ourselves and what
is the path that’s been shown for us to get back to ourselves.”
at’s the perspective I’d like to use in addressing addiction tonight.
Obviously, there are many, many ways of looking at addictions, this being
one of them. But for me, it’s also the most useful, practical, and the most
liberating. And, of course, I’m talking not just spiritually or in the abstract,
nor am I just talking about the highly addicted population of human
beings with whom I’ve worked with the last twelve years: people who die of
HIV, people who die of Hepatitis C, people who die of infections of all
kinds, people who die of overdoses, people who commit suicide, people
who have accidents because they are too drugged to look after themselves.
No, I’m not just talking about them. I’m also talking about myself in that
when I look at addictive patterns in my own life, and I do have them,
when I get past the shame that I feel, when I get past the guilt, or the
defensiveness, or the denial that automatically accompanies any addictive
behavior, there is always profound teaching there.
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Let me actually begin with a very personal example—a very recent one.
Because of my books and because of my name, I get a lot of people writing
to me and wanting to meet me. I don’t have a whole lot of time to meet a
whole lot of people, but I do have a dog called Rosie, and I walk her every
day, and I say to people who contact me, “Okay, meet me and come and
walk the dog with me.” So two weeks ago, I walked on four different
mornings with four different people, and one of them was a woman in her
forties, twenty years younger than me, the mother of two kids, and we had
coffee, went for a walk, and by the time I got home I was all excited. My
wife, Rae, who knows me all too well, says “Are you in love?” And I said,
“Well, I find her attractive, but I find you attractive too.” Quick recovery.
You know the story of the guy who goes into the bar, you’ve seen this is
the movies, you know, he’s all alone in the bar at midnight and he’s crying
in his beer and says to the bartender, “You know, my problem is that my
wife doesn’t understand me.” Well, my problem is that my wife
understands me. But what happened subsequently is because I wasn’t
honest. I was really excited about having met this woman and there was
this charge, a sexual energy there, this attraction and playfulness. And I hid
that from my wife.
So we got into this playful, flirtatious email exchange. Now if we had to
do it by mail or carrier pigeon, this wouldn’t happen. But the speed of
email allows the exchange of several messages a day and of course you wait
for the next message and you’re interpreting, “What does she mean by that
phrase?” It stopped within two or three days, but was enough so that my
wife was hurt. And not because anything had happened or was going to in
the physical sense, but simply because I was clearly draining energy from
our relationship and putting it somewhere else.
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And where that was coming from is that I had spiritually and
emotionally allowed myself to get defeated by taking on too much work.
My workaholism got the better of me. And when I allow that to happen, I
get defeated, and then I don’t do my spiritual work and I lose myself. I lose
my connection to myself. I create that void, that emptiness, and whenever
that void or emptiness is created, I want to fill that up from the outside.
at filling up could be more work, more public recognition, or it could be
just the exciting idea that a younger woman finds me attractive. And it had
nothing to do with the other person—she had her own role, whatever her
own need was, but I’m talking about myself here. It came out of a position
of emptiness.
What I’m also saying is that emptiness is precisely the foundation for
addiction. Whenever we feel empty, whenever we allow ourselves to
become defeated, or whenever we are impaired from knowing who we are,
whenever we are disconnected from ourselves, addiction can flood in. It
could just be flirtation. It could be in some cases repeated sexual acting out.
It could be shopping, it could be gambling, it could be work, it could even
be meditation, it could be exercise. In the case of the most affected
individuals, it will be drugs—in such a way as to make their lives
completely unmanageable; in fact, threaten their lives. Not only threaten
their lives, but take their lives, as with many of the clients who I’ve worked
with. But the basis of it all is the disconnect from themselves, a desperate
emptiness. And that, of course, is the Buddhist image of the Hungry Ghost
—these creatures with large, empty bellies, small scrawny necks, and tiny
mouths and they are always trying to get satisfaction from the outside.
So the question is “What is that all about?” By the way, my little
escapade of two weeks ago reminded me of the ending of the wonderful
book e Plague, by Albert Camus. It takes place in Algeria and there’s a
bubonic plague epidemic and it is Dr. Rieux, who is one of the people in
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